Jan Plamper's scholarship delves into Russian history, with a particular focus on the history of emotions. His work critically examines how emotions are constructed and experienced within Russian culture and society. He explores the nuanced ways affect and feeling shape historical narratives and social dynamics.
We Are All Migrants is the first narrative history of multicultural Germany, told through life-stories, charting the groups and waves of post-1945 migration to Germany, West and East, and showing that the story of immigration to Germany is a success story.
this introductory volume will be difficult to surpass Times Literary Supplement
Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.